"Preamble"

Fair Weather

Artists:

On November 25th, Fair Weather is releasing a four-way split that sounds like it's being drawn and quartered: you have New Jersey's literate, ornate and nautically-minded Prawn with two Chicago bands who represent divergent styles that have been lumped into "Midwestern emo", aka shouty, math-wrath (Droughts) and sweet-and-sour pop-punk (Kittyhawk). And then there's Gainesville, Fla.'s Frameworks, more twisted and fractured than the entire Gators roster.

On "Preamble", Frameworks aspire to bury the listener in their own self-invented hyphenates, a tri-partite pile up in less than three minutes. In the interest of brevity, "melodic hardcore" is open-ended enough to fit the spirited, Titus Andronicus-style downstrokes and handclaps of the intro and the waltz-time midsection that could kinda accurately be described as "lounge screamo." But hey, at least Luke Pate's serrated screaming stays constant enough to pass for a "voice of reason" throughout the chaos. They're set to hit the studio with producer Jack Shirley in the new year, and it'll probably take a guy with his specific experience to keep these guys under control - after all, he helmed a little record called Sunbather.